Treasure haul in the Atlantic

Not much detail yet on this story; "colonial-era" is pretty vague. More will surely be coming out soon.

US treasure hunters have recovered half a million silver coins and hundreds of gold coins and worked gold from a colonial-era shipwreck in the Atlantic.

Odyssey Marine Exploration said the find was the largest of its kind and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

"The gold coins are almost all dazzling mint state specimens," Odyssey co-founder Greg Stemm said.

The team has kept secret the location of the wreck, codenamed Black Swan, citing security and legal reasons.

A bit more detail here:

Company co-founder Greg Stemm said a formal announcement will come later, but court records indicate the coins might have come from the wreck of a 17th century merchant ship found off southwestern England.

Beware of jambiya-snatchers

When in Yemen, leave your fancy dagger at home:

Abdul Wali Ali al-Robaiyee, 67, of Sana’a, owner of 30 very pricey jambiyas, describes one of the ways that thieves use to snatch a jambiya from an unsuspecting victim. First, the attacker tosses a cloud of spices into the eyes of the victim, temporarily blinding him. This gives the thief enough time to snatch the jambiya from its sheath and flee. This procedure is mostly done in the old city of Sana’a, because streets are narrow and winding, making escape easy, said al-Robaiyee.

“In the old city of Sana’a this happens more than any other place. The small streets and the numerous side roads can make the victim very distracted, so that he loses the thief quickly.” “Some even run into stores or even homes, making it easier for them to disappear. The victim would stay at least five minutes with his eyes blurry and burning, and in the end he lost a very costly jambiya.” The number of jambiya thefts has been greater this year than ever before, said Abdul-Salaam al-Shibami of the Sana’a police department in Bab al-Yemen.

“It started more than 10 years ago, but now it is increasing, and thieves are using different techniques. I advise older people who walk alone during the later part of the night not to wear their jambiyas for their own safety.”

Kalamazoo!

OK -- I missed the annual Medieval Studies mega-congress at Kalamazoo once again this year. It's quite an event, though -- and anyone who's been, should take a look at some rather special reminiscences here. An excerpt:

I droned on in as perfect a monotone as I could manage, safe in the knowledge that such a reading would give my work the proper gravitas. When it was time for questions at the end, I filibustered, turning my first answer into the only answer time allowed.

And continued::

As I had predicted, my presentation was a rousing success. But then, academics are like swine. As long as the farmer with the slop-bucket seems confident of himself they’ll happily eat up any sort of swill and grunt for seconds. Thirds if the farmer is named Foucault.

Where will it all end?

Incredible prices this week:

A new record was set for work by Andy Warhol when a painting of a car crash sold for $71.7m (£36.3m) in New York.

The 1963 painting, Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), depicts an overturned car on fire. . .

The sale, at Christie's, was part of the second most-lucrative art auction ever, earning a total of $385m (£195m).

Final figures beat Christie's most optimistic expectations by some $80m, while only four of 78 works on offer failed to sell.

Records were broken by more than half of the 50 artists represented, including British artist Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter and Donald Judd. . .

However, none of the works on sale managed to match the $72.84 million fetched by a Mark Rothko at Sotheby's on Tuesday night, which shattered the record for post-war art at auction.

From the BBC.

Victory through silt

Alexander the Great had ''Mother Nature'' on his side when he conquered the island fortress of Tyre in 332 BC . . .

Now archeologists have at last worked out how Alexander's engineers managed to build a causeway to enable his army to conquer what had become a bastion of resistance. . .

Archaeologists have known for some time that Alexander used the debris of the abandoned mainland city to build a causeway 3,000 yards long and up to 180 yards across. Once within reach of the city walls, he used siege engines to batter and finally breach the fortifications.

But building a causeway in deep water would have meant raising the level of the sea floor considerably - an impossible feat in such a short space of time. However, researchers in France who analysed the coastal sediment record for the past 10,000 years have discovered how Alexander's engineers exploited a natural underwater "sandbridge".

The ''sandbridges'' are formed when sediment is deposited rapidly at a spot behind an island.

From the Telegraph.

Gardens of Lucullus found under the Hertziana

Mosaics from the fabled Gardens of Lucullus, one of the pioneering influences on gardening, have been brought to light after 2,000 years by archaeologists in Rome.

The vast terraced gardens, or Horti, covered what is now the built-up area above the Spanish Steps. The first known attempt in the West to “tame nature” through landscaping, the gardens were laid out around a patrician villa in the middle of the 1st century BC by Lucius Licinius Lucullus, one of Ancient Rome’s most celebrated generals, after he retired in disillusion from war and politics.

They became a benchmark for all Roman pleasure gardens, and were taken over and developed by Roman emperors. The 1st-century mosaics decorated the nymphaeum, an artificial grotto with water features. One depicts a corpulent cupid riding a dolphin and another a wolf’s head in green and gold.

Appropriately enough, they were found below the Hertziana, a central destination for any art historian working in Rome.

Excavations below the library have also brought to light a marble head of Venus, perhaps a relic of the statues that once adorned the nymphaeum. Maria Antonietta Tomei, of the Rome Superintendency for Archaeology, said when workers began demolishing the interior of the building to modernise it “the architecture of the Ancient Roman garden appeared before our eyes. It seems like a dream.”

From the Times of London.

Ancient Roman bridgework

The earliest known dental prosthesis from ancient Rome may not have been very functional, but it gave its wealthy wearer a million dollar smile.

The gleaming grin resulted from multi-karat gold wire, which was used to string together "artificial teeth," according to the team of Italian researchers who analyzed the ancient bridgework.

They found the object, which dates from the 1st to the 2nd century A.D., in the mouth of an unidentified woman who was buried in an elaborate mausoleum within a Roman necropolis.

From Discovery News.

Re-excavating Silbury Hill

The secrets of Britain’s most enigmatic prehistoric mound lie behind a locked green door at its foot. Yesterday the steel door was opened for the first time in 40 years to allow archaeologists access to the heart of Silbury Hill.

The 40m (131ft) hill, not far from the Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire, was built 4,500 years ago from 300,000 cubic yards (250,000 cubic metres) of chalk, with nothing more than hand tools and shovels made from deer antlers. No one knows why it was built, why the site was chosen or what its significance might have been.

English Heritage gave the go-ahead to a £500,000 attempt to unlock the secrets of Silbury Hill when it became clear that part of the largest man-made prehistoric monument in Europe was in danger of collapse.

From the Times of London.

Marine archeology, with a big stick

CHINA has sent its navy to protect marine archeologists on an expedition that salvaged more than 10,000 pieces of antique porcelain from a sunken junk in a campaign against looters and art smugglers.

It is believed to be the first time that China has deployed its armed forces to stop the plunder of its undersea cultural heritage along the ancient shipping routes, which are known in Chinese as the “silk road of the seas”.

Officials on Hainan Island, in the South China Sea, disclosed that naval vessels and units of the People’s Armed Police had accompanied diving teams on the 55-day mission, which ended last week. . .

Navy gunboats and paramilitary guards escorted boats to and from the diving site in Chinese waters, as the archeologists ferried their finds back to Hainan, he said.

The operation came almost four months after collectors had spent about £2m and sent values soaring at a Sotheby’s auction in Amsterdam of 18th-century Chinese export porcelain which had been recovered legally from another wreck off Vietnam. . .

The next showdown between the smugglers and the state is likely to take place over a cluster of wrecks found last year off Fujian province, between Hong Kong and Shanghai.

“A lot of people have rushed to raise, steal and smuggle out these underwater relics,” said a recent edict from the provincial government, ordering police and marine border units to intensify checks on speedboats and to apprehend suspicious strangers. Legislators in Fujian have urged the authorities to offer rewards of more than £30,000 for information on thefts and the smuggling of antiques.

Archeologists lament that many wrecks are damaged by treasure hunting fishermen who drop dynamite into the sea, then collect the debris that comes to the surface.

From the Sunday Times.

More Roman digging

A planned hi-tech driverless underground railway line set to bring desperately needed transport links to the historic heart of Rome has run into a minefield of Roman remains.

Planners aim to send the new C line under the city centre at a depth of 30 metres, well beneath the archaeological treasures that litter Rome. Stations will also be built deep underground, but even the simple task of digging entrances and exits is proving a headache and could mean the scrapping of the Largo Torre Argentina stop . . .

From the Guardian, which also notes:

The C line's builders have offered archaeologists a rare glimpse at Rome's imperial past and are obliged by law to slalom around valuable finds.

Sounds as if it might be quite a twisty ride, if and when it gets done.

Shoring up the Palatine

The Palatine is honeycombed with cavities - the result of centuries of tunnelling and digging.

Instead of demolishing homes and palaces the Romans built on top of them. So while the structures may look solid from above, below they rest on shaky foundations.

So dangerous have some of the structures become that now less than half of the Palatine Hill is open to the public.

From a BBC article, whose upshot is that much more money is needed to safeguard Rome's archeological heritage.

"Urban renewal" hits Moscow

Moscow's unique and diverse architectural heritage is under "full-scale attack" and in serious danger of disappearing altogether, a group of British and Russian experts warned yesterday.

Russia's sprawling capital is being transformed into a series of "super-gentrified ghettos," an "ersatz city" fit only for "Gucci-bagged oligarchs' wives".

In a report entitled Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point, two architectural charities - the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society and Save Europe's Heritage - say the scale of destruction under Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, has been breathtaking. During the past five years about 1,000 historic buildings have disappeared. Some 200 of them were listed monuments.

Although Russia has strict preservation laws, corrupt officials failed to enforce the rules. Other historic buildings mysteriously "burned down", the report says.

From the Guardian.

Mud pack for the Taj Mahal

The Indian Parliament was told in a report this week that air pollution from local industry was again discolouring the Taj’s gleaming surface day by day. Blame for its yellow tinge has been laid on consistently high levels of “suspended particulate matter” – otherwise known as grains of dirt – created by the burning of fossil fuels at nearby factories and by clouds of dust from roads.

The proposed solution for India’s biggest tourist attraction, located in the city of Agra, 130 miles (210km) southeast of Delhi, is appropriate for an object of beauty: a therapeutic mud pack.

“To restore the pristine glory of the Taj Mahal . . . the clay-pack treatment, which is non-corrosive and non-abrasive, [should be] carried out for the removal of the accretionary deposits,” the report said.

The process, which takes two to three months, is labour-intensive and expensive. Workers on scaffolding smear wet mud on the surface of the building and let it dry before washing it off.

The lime-rich multani mitti – a type of clay found in northern India and used in modern face masks and Ayurvedic body treatments – draws out most of the accumulated dirt.

Full story in the Times of London.